The Memory of Midnight (48 page)

‘You weren’t useless,’ she said.

‘I couldn’t do anything to help you!’ The words were wrenched out of him, flung at her almost accusingly.

‘You did help,’ said Tess. ‘I needed to know that you were there for me, and you were. I needed to know you would keep Oscar safe, and you did.’

Luke lifted his head at that. With a twisted smile, he drew a tender finger down her cheek. ‘I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to be a hero and save you, but you saved
yourself.’

Her memory was coming back, fished up from the river piece by piece. She lay back against her pillows, glad of the quiet, of Luke’s warm touch. It would hurt too much to shake her head.
‘Nell saved me,’ she said.

Luke gave her some more water.

‘Go on,’ she said after she’d drunk. ‘What happened next?’

‘Then the paramedics were there, shoving me out of the way, and the police bundled me downstairs, so I didn’t get a chance to see much else, but I’ve taken pictures after bombs
have gone off, and it doesn’t look like that.’

‘You mean it wasn’t a real bomb?’

‘Apparently it was but for some reason the detonator didn’t work.’

Tess stared at him, wishing that she could rub her aching forehead. ‘Then what exploded?’

‘Nothing. It seems that the noise came from part of the fireplace collapsing. You were hit by a piece of it, but most of it fell on top of Martin. He’s dead, Tess.’

Martin was dead. Tess looked at the curtain. It was a pale, listless green. Her husband was dead. She ought to feel something, surely?

‘I’m glad,’ she said uncertainly at last. It felt all wrong, but when she tested the notion for shock or horror or grief, all she could find was relief. ‘Yes, I’m
glad.’

‘At first the police thought the collapse had been triggered by the bomb detonating, but now it seems that didn’t happen, so no one can explain it.

‘There’s something else you need to know, Tess,’ Luke said after a moment. ‘When they inspected the fireplace, they found a skeleton of a body that had been wedged in a
hole. They’re going to do a post-mortem examination but it seems like it’s very old.’

‘Nell . . .’ Tess let out a long breath as the swirling in her head juddered to a halt and the last terrible memories slotted back into place.

Luke leant forward, lowering his voice. ‘What happened in there, Tess?’

He listened, grim-faced, as she told him about Nell’s horrific end. When she had finished, the tears were streaming down her face and she was struggling to get out of bed again.

‘I’ve got to tell the police to look behind the wall in the corner! They need to find Meg!’

‘Whoa! Wait!’ Luke tried to ease her back against the pillows as a nurse pulled open the curtain and frowned at the scene. ‘The police want to interview you,’ he said,
‘so you can tell them then.’

‘Now, what’s all this?’ said the nurse, bustling forward to take over from Luke. ‘Get back into bed, Tess,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ve had concussion and
you need to lie still for a bit.’

‘I’ve got to get up! I need to talk to the police.’

‘The police can wait until the doctor’s seen you. And as for you,’ said the nurse turning a stern look on Luke, ‘what are you thinking of, getting her all
upset?’

‘Sorry.’ He began to back away but Tess held out a bandaged hand to him. ‘Please, Luke, you have to tell them! Make them look right now!’

He grimaced. ‘Tess, what can I say? There’s no damage to that part of the room.’

‘I don’t care. Tell them something. Anything! But make them look. Ralph said . . .’ She gulped back the horror that still stuck in her throat at the memory. ‘He said they
would put her body in the secret stairway, but he was going to have the exit bricked up. She’s still there, Luke.’ Tess’s eyes filled with tears of grief and rage. ‘She was
barely eleven, and she died in terror and alone. They have to find her! You have to make them!’

‘All right,’ said Luke, unable to bear the look on her face. ‘I’ll tell them,’ he promised. ‘We’ll find Meg.’

A glassy, glittery frost lay over the ground and rimed the trees as they lowered the coffin carefully into the grave. The chill bit at her cheeks and Tess huddled into her
coat, squinting into the bright winter light. Even in gloves, her hands holding the small sprig of rosemary were numb with cold. Her fingers, so raw when they had pulled her from the rubble, had
healed miraculously by the time they unwrapped the bandages. The doctors couldn’t explain it.

They had found Meg exactly where Tess had said she would be. Tess had wept when she heard.

Both bodies were sent for forensic examination, and when all the tests were done, Tess had lobbied for them to be buried together, with the garnet ring that had been found with Nell’s
skeleton. She had paid for the funeral. It was the least she could do for Nell, who had saved her from Martin.

Since that dreadful day, Tess had stayed firmly in the present, although it seemed to her that the past still echoed sometimes in the air. Every now and then she thought she caught a glimpse of
a familiar face in the shadows. Out of the corner of her eye she would see the whisk of a skirt disappearing down an alley, but no matter how swiftly she turned to look more closely, it would be
gone. Some days she would swear that the breeze carried the sounds and smells of the streets Nell had known. Then Tess would stop and strain her senses, but it was like trying to grasp the mist in
her hand, and the next moment the wind would change and blow them away again.

She chose the sonorous words of the Order for the Burial of the Dead from the 1662
Book of Common Prayer
for Nell and Meg:
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live,
and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like
a flower.
Tess let the words resonate through her. Nell had had her share of misery, but she had had her joys too.

Deliberately, Tess let herself remember Nell’s happiest times. Walking alongside Tom eating hot pies. Hoisting her skirts to wade into the Foss and dig her toes into the soft mud. Lying in
the long grass, cocooned in warmth and ease, her heart beating in time with Tom’s. Holding Meg in her arms for the first time; spinning Hugh until he squealed with laughter. Sitting in her
garden; dancing at Yule; laughing in the market.

Good times, ordinary times, side by side with the horror that was Ralph. Tess looked down at the rosemary in her hands and her throat ached for Nell’s courage, for the way she had seized
what joy she could from her life.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sisters here departed, we therefore commit their bodies to the ground
.

Luke stepped forward and dropped a sprig of rosemary onto the coffin.

When they asked her how she had known where to find the second body, Tess had demurred. ‘Just a feeling,’ she had said, and no one had pressed too hard.

There was still no explanation for why the fireplace had collapsed when it did. Tess thought she knew. Past and present had collided in the back room that day, and the huge burst of energy that
had resulted had released Nell from her dreadful prison at last. When Tess came out of hospital, Luke had arranged for Pat French to conduct a service of deliverance in the ruined bedroom. For
Tess, expecting drama and horror, it had been a quiet and unexpectedly moving ceremony.

The coroner’s inquest into Martin’s death had been thorough, but in the absence of any other evidence, he had had no choice but to return an open verdict.

Aghast at the damage to his flat, Richard had returned to York to oversee repairs and comfort Ashrafar who he persisted in believing was traumatized, although Tess had seen little sign of it.
The cat had seemed perfectly normal to her, but Oscar had had nightmares when she tried to re-establish a routine, and she wasn’t sorry to leave the memories behind when Richard announced
that he was coming back. His academic interest had been roused by the skeletons in the priest holes and he was planning a whole new section for his chapter on murder in his book on Tudor crime.
Tess was going to let him make what he would of the evidence. His story would not be hers.

She and Oscar had spent a few weeks with her chastened mother, who was horrified at what Martin had done, and once Tess had been granted probate on Martin’s estate she had been able to
rent a cottage in one of the villages outside York. Oscar went to the local school and had stopped asking to see Sam and Rosie now. For a while Vanessa had tried to pretend that nothing had
happened, but Tess found it hard to forgive her for handing Oscar over to Martin, and once she had moved, Vanessa stopped calling.

Luke spent a lot of time at the cottage with them. Oscar missed him when he wasn’t there, and Tess did too, but she baulked at asking him to move in permanently. After being tied to Martin
and Ralph, she couldn’t stomach the thought of linking her fate to another man.

Once or twice they had discussed it. ‘I’m just not ready,’ she had said.

‘That’s okay,’ Luke said easily. ‘There’s no hurry. I’m happy to go on as we are. It’s fine, Tess.’

Now at the graveside, Tess looked at him. A scattering of people had come: the forensic pathologist who had examined Nell and Meg’s remains, the archaeologists who were interested in the
few artefacts found in the priest holes. Ambrose was there, and Richard, out of very different professional interests.

Luke was there for
her
. Luke who had believed her, who had been there when she needed him. Who still was.

Sensing her gaze, he lifted his eyes from the coffin and met hers, and in spite of the solemnity of the occasion, Tess felt lust curl in her belly. They were different still, and they argued,
but Luke challenged, he didn’t try to control. He helped, he didn’t attempt to take over. She thought about the quick laughter they shared and the sharp spear of desire she felt at his
touch. About the friendship that ran clear and true through every argument, and the sense of sailing into a safe harbour at last when she lay curled against him and listened to him breathing.

She thought about Nell and Tom, and how much they had risked for that. For them, the longing to be together had ended in tragedy, but that didn’t mean it would be the same for her and
Luke. Nell’s story didn’t have to be hers. Perhaps, Tess told herself, it was time to stop being afraid of the past and start living for the future. She would talk to Luke when they got
home.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and
certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ
, the priest intoned and Tess stepped up
to the grave.

As soon as she was out of hospital she had gone back to work on the assize court records. Only the week before she had come across an entry dated 1588. Janet Scott, widow, indicted for murder.
Tess’s hand had begun to shake as she transcribed and translated. An inquisition on the body of Ralph Maskewe, merchant, had found that on 31 October the said Janet had stabbed Ralph Maskewe
to death with a dagger while they were lying together in bed.

Had some shared madness seized them, Tess wondered, or had Janet turned at last on her partner in pain? Either way, Ralph had been spared the lingering death Nell would have wished for him, but
it had been sordid and, Tess hoped, painful. The jury had been in little doubt of their verdict on Janet.
Guilty
, was the clerk’s laconic record.
To hang
.

Tess looked at the rosemary in her hand – rosemary for remembrance. Earlier that morning she had stood alone on Ouse Bridge and watched the sunlight striking diamond bright on the water
that was Tom’s grave as she dropped a sprig into the river in his memory. Now she let the rosemary fall gently from her hand onto the coffin where Nell and Meg lay together. She would
remember them all.

‘Rest in peace, Nell,’ she said.

Murder in Merry England

The discovery last year of two skeletons found walled up in a house in Stonegate was a story that caught the public imagination for a while, and many theories were put forward
about who they were and how they came to be there. These are questions, historians say, that can never be answered conclusively.

‘The evidence can only take us so far,’ says historian Richard Landrow, whose forthcoming book on Tudor crime will include a discussion of the Stonegate skeletons. ‘Forensic
examination of the two bodies established that they were both female and approximately four to five hundred years old. One was of a young girl between ten and fourteen years of age, and the other
of a woman in her early thirties who had given birth. DNA analysis proved that they were related, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that they were mother and daughter, but we can’t say
for sure that was the case.’

Landrow points out that the forensic evidence, while compelling, is limited. ‘We know that the young girl’s hyoid bone was fractured, indicating that she was strangled, and she had a
broken finger, but there is no evidence as to how the older individual died. There was some damage to the finger bones and, horrifyingly, it’s possible that she was walled up alive and
starved to death, but again, we can’t be certain.’

Beyond that, Landrow says, everything has to be speculation. ‘Stonegate was a high-status street in the Tudor period and there’s no sign of malnourishment, which suggests that these
two females were members of the civic elite.’ However, the evidence from the artefacts discovered with the skeletons is confusing, Landrow admits. While some of the surviving objects such as
buckles and fragments of girdles are clearly high status, the only ring found with the older skeleton was set with a cheap garnet. ‘We would expect a wealthy woman of her age to be wearing
jewellery of a much higher quality. It’s a puzzle.’

Landrow, who lives in the house where the bodies were discovered and has a particular interest in the case, has been unable to identify them further. ‘York has extraordinarily rich
archives, but sadly we are still missing a lot of documentary material for the period, and there is no way to trace the ownership of this particular house.’ Nor are there any accounts of two
members of a family abruptly disappearing. ‘It’s possible that whoever was responsible for their deaths simply put it about that they had run away,’ Landrow suggests. The bodies
were hidden so successfully that it must have been done with the collusion of the head of the household, he thinks. ‘As historians, we can speculate,’ he says, ‘but we have to
accept that much of the past is unknowable and that there are some things that can never be explained.’